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Re: AlphaStation 500 installation



I have a Alphastation 500/500 with exactly that configuration and installation of Sarge worked about one year ago (kernel from boot-cd was 2.4.27), but not very good (problem with XFS filesystem, scsi ternination,...). It depended on the CD drive. A yamaha one didn't work (exactly your problem). Then I installed a TEAC CD-R60 and it worked.

The problem could be that qlogicisp driver of linux 2.4. The error handling in this driver is rather bad (it later crashed my harddisk filesystem because of a missing terminator, latzer booting with a kernel 2.6 with qla1280 driver showed the ternmination problems...).

Please check the follwoing:
* is the bus correctly terminated (it is important that there is a plugable scsi terminator on the external scsi slot because the qlogic controller is not auto-terminating the external slot)? * it is better to use a recent 2.6 kernel on the alphastation 500 (be sure to use the LATEST debian 2.6.15 from debian, older versions have a problem in the IRQ handler that sometimes crash the system in the Alcor [= Alphastation] variation). Try using a recent Testing/Etch installation CD (a CD with kernel 2.6.15 was released 2 weeks ago). This boots without any problems and should install fine.

At 22:59 03.03.2006, Steve Langasek wrote:
On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 10:27:43PM +0100, Martin Walther wrote:
> Am 03.03.2006 um 21:53 schrieb Steve Langasek:

> >What is the controller that the CD drive is connected to?

> The scsi controller is the normal onboard scsi controller. It's a
> Qlogic ISP 1020 PCI SCSI Adapter.
> It looks like that the problem isn't in founding the scsi controller.
> Maybe the installer loads the wrong drivers. Anyway the installer
> couldn't mount the cd.

> The CD drive is running but nothing realy happends.

I'm afraid that definitely rules out any possibility of it being a missing
driver, since this driver is definitely present in the initrd and is the one
that I used for all my testing for sarge.

If you switch to vt2 in the installer and look in /dev/discs, what does it
show?

--
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/


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